


V for Valkyrie

by JU_Zumester



Series: Bulletproof!verse [1]
Category: V for Vendetta (2005)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood blood and more blood, Dubious Science, F/M, Fan Soundtracks, Norse Mythology - Freeform, OTP Feels, Post-Canon Fix-It, V being an insufferable dork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:11:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5056957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JU_Zumester/pseuds/JU_Zumester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm done for," he'd said. And she'd sent him away in that subway car, fully believing him. And of course, he had believed himself, too. Waking up in the Houses of Parliament on the morning of November 6th hadn't been part of his plan.</p><p>But today is a new day, and a new day means a new plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	V for Valkyrie

**Author's Note:**

> What can I say? V just refuses to die. What'd he say about that, again? Oh yeah. 
> 
> "Beneath this mask, there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof."
> 
> Optional Soundtrack:  
> Track 1: [ AFI - Miss Murder ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxU2ToSunY)  
> Track 2: [ Fall Out Boy - Just One Yesterday ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfKSUd31MM&index=64)  
> Track 3: [ Andrew Belle - In My Veins ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSYnOeO5rdk)  
> Track 4: [ Antony & The Johnsons - Bird Gerhl ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePNvuuNClpA)
> 
> Side note: Because there are a lot of gaps about V's life and identity that aren't filled in by the movie, I'm going to be making a lot up. I'm not sure how much more is explained in the graphic novel, so there may be discrepancies. I'd like to remain as true to the graphic novel as possible, so if you notice that something in my writing doesn't correlate with it, please let me know. If I can fit it into the story, I will.

* * *

 

**[Track 1]**

Valkyrie.

_noun._

Originating in Norse mythology. Any of the beautiful maidens who attend upon Odin and Tyr, choosing which warriors are to die in battle and which are to survive; bringing the souls of the slain to Valhalla.

 

You imagine it must have been (could have been nothing _but_ ) a valkyrie, clawing at the vestiges of your subconscious through clouds of debris and rivers of clotted blood and strings of inky darkness and the lukewarm clutches of death--because that’s what death is. It’s not searing hot. It’s not icy cold. Death is nothing. Death is the void. Death is respite from a lifetime of seeing and hearing and touching and feeling and being. In the end, the hands of death were lukewarm against your slowly numbing body. In the end, there was no after. There was nothing at all.

And that nothing has been stolen from you. By the valkyrie; yes, the valkyrie. You recognize it because its hands _are_ hot. Excruciatingly hot. You feel its feathery touches graze your skin, and every inch of you feels like the surface of some distant sun. Eyelids peel themselves open to study a desolate wasteland. Chunks of concrete, broken glass, splintered wood, melted odds and ends that you can’t label. Your vision is blurry, and you seem to recognize these things more on instinct than by careful analysis.

In another life, as another person, you might have believed that the incongruous silhouettes above you were hallucinations. The products of an ill mind. But you’ve given up on coincidence. You’ve cast aside assumption and ignorance like the liars that they are. Because you _shouldn’t be alive_.

No matter what they’d done to you at Larkhill, there is no way that that science could have turned you into this. You were the centerpiece of an explosion powerful enough to level an entire building. There shouldn’t be anything left of you--much less a heartbeat. And if, after a few doubletakes, the spectres disappear, it only means that they’ve left. That their work has been finished. That you were not destined to die as one of the slain. One of the souls bound for Valhalla.

The valkyrie’s had picked over your body and called you a survivor.

As you come back to yourself, you become increasingly aware of the powerful stench hanging in the air. The odor of rotting flesh and super heated chemicals. The taste of so much iron in your mouth. Steam wafts off of your body and strings of flesh hold you together--skin melded into fabric melded into plastic melded into more skin. A piece of you here, a piece of you there, and it should be all you can do not to die a dozen more deaths at the horror of it all.

But your name is V, and you live a life without fear.

* * *

 

**[Track 2]**

Time is a strange concept, even for those who aren’t covered in their own blood.  
  
It might be minutes before you’re on your feet. It might be hours before you’re forging your way through the wreckage of England’s fascism. It might be days before you leave the remains of Parliament. You can’t be sure, and you don’t really care. You don’t care how or why your body is (mostly) in one piece. The only thing that you know for sure is that you’re alive, and you haven't decided what to do with that knowledge. So you move. Escape Parliament. Trudge down an alleyway under the comfortable cover of nightfall. Probably leaving a trail of fluids in your wake, but that’s not something that you can avoid.

You need to get back to the Shadow Gallery. Stitch together the remains of your identity. Make something of this second lease on life that has been so brusquely shoved into your ruined arms. Replace your mask (because it's melted along, with everything else around you). Cover up this offending skin--

Plotting steps wind up and down side streets. The lack of pedestrians on the streets is familiar and expected--after years of imposed curfews. But what’s not so familiar (though just as expected) is the complete absence of Fingermen. There are no government officials to hinder your bid for freedom. Nothing to stand in your way.

It’s a gift, and you’d like to think that it makes your midnight exodus that much easier. A scalding kiss from the valkyrie to whom you owe this pleasure.

Dawn is beginning to cast its eyes upon the land when you reach the edges of London and, by extension, your home. Stumble into the shade offered by an abandoned warehouse. Make your way through its dimly lit halls and open up a panel in the wall of what used to be a packaging floor. Close it behind you. Grope your way through the darkness. Feel around for the keypad that you know is at the end of it. Enter the necessary code from raw memory. (And how exactly do you remember trivial little things like this, after having your brain blasted to smithereens and then stitched back together by the hands of fate? How are the neurons responsible for such memories still here, still firing in all of the same patterns they’ve always fired in before?)

A door opens, dust displaced and thrown into the air. You plunge through the resulting gap. One flight of stair's later, your legs betray you, allow you to sink gracelessly to the floor, giving out after too many miles walked, one too many explosions survived. Fate or not. It's a miracle that you're still a person, and so the miracle that you were able to make it all the way here in your state can be ignored. Forgiven in the causative of the truly impossible.

There is a spinning in your head. Paintings careen past your field of view. Light and shadow blink in and out of existence. Unconsciousness comes with little warning, preceded by an undignified loss of balance and an uncomfortable numbing in your extremities. You’re off like a light.

* * *

 

**[Track 3]**

You don’t know where the light is coming from. You don’t recall leaving anything on when you left last.

But you suppose that it doesn’t matter, with your face stamped upon the carpet and your arms like jelly underneath you. Consciousness is a flickering headlamp and it’s not long before you’re out again.

* * *

 

An uncharacteristic growl from the pit of your stomach and you know that your body needs food. At the moment, the idea is not overwhelmingly appealing. Not when your stomach was so much molten biomass less than 24 hours ago (oh dear, it _has_ only been a day, hasn’t it?).

But you’re going to waste away if you don’t eat. Waste the gift that has been bestowed upon you. And you can’t have that. So you haul your body up into what passes for a standing position and hobble your way over to the kitchen.

Hands slide across a granite counter top by muscle memory and it’s only out of a reflexive desire for cleanliness that you check your hands and know, before looking, that they must be filthy.

You expect layer upon layer of scar tissue. A grotesque abstract painting of red and white. Bumpy flesh that’s long past pain. What you find is smooth, pale human skin. Thin strips of sinew connecting each finger to thicker palms. Soft and tender to the touch. New. _Regrown_.

Your feet fail you, as they have so many times now that it’s no longer a surprise.

You’ve missed the floor in the few minutes that you’ve been free of it.

* * *

 

It’s understandable that you didn’t notice it before, clawing through the streets of a sleepy London, or lying half-conscious on your living room floor.

But with the worst of the shock come and gone, it’s impossible not to notice now. Eyelids, healthy and fully formed, flutter over equally healthy eyes. Force themselves shut. Leave it all up to touch, to tentative fingers, to map a body that is alien to you. Warm skin that is without flaw. The beginnings of body hair. Peach fuzz. No callouses, no crevices, no waxy bumps or ridges for your fingers to find comfort and memory in. All of the hard-earned ups and downs that had made your body yours are gone, and you’re left with this reboot, this do over. This hunk of offending muscle and bone. This sack of meat.

And it’s a beautiful, wonderful treasure. But it’s also terrifying. (And what beautiful thing isn’t?)

Ups and downs become contours and dips. The points of your hip bones. The indentations in your ribs. The gentle curvature of your spine. A chest noticeably lacking in bullet holes. A defined jaw. The beginnings of stubble. And you almost can’t believe it. Facial hair. _Facial hair_. You’d long since thought that such things were one of the luxuries that Larkhill had stolen from you, in the aftermath of all encompassing flame.

An idea penetrates your thoughts.

Hands slither higher, still higher, over developed ears. Skim over the taut skin of your skull. The beginnings of hair--real hair--prickle the sensitive nerves at the tips of your fingers. You’re not used to such sensitivity. It’s as though you’ve never touched, never seen, never heard. All is new, and you are new, and somewhere out there beyond the walls of the Shadow Gallery, surrounding the smokey corpse of Parliament, the world is new.

* * *

 

Water screams on its way out of the shower head. Leaves your world wet and slippery and confused. You lean against the shower wall, scrubbing away, eyes unfocused on some place between the wall and where you stand.

Stepping out of the spray, finding one of the dozens of replacement masks hiding haphazardly throughout your home is of top priority. It’s the first thing that you apply to damp skin.

Shoveling food mechanically into your mouth--only to find that it carries a flavor that it had never seemed to carry before.

Rummaging through your closet and pulling on one of a dozen sets of the same black uniform--only to find a plague of goosebumps rising to the surface of every place that is touched.

You studiously avoid mirrors. Catch accidental glimpses of skin, but have no desire to see the face that has been reborn, like everything else.

Wander the halls, leaving fingers to linger on the metal of a knight’s armor, a priceless clay vase, the frame of a painting examined too many times to hold much unexplored meaning--and find a world of new ideas that were never there before.

Wonder what it means, that you’ve been opened up to an entirely new dimension to space time that was once closed to you. It seems impossible. A year ago, you would have called yourself a scholar. A lover of knowledge, of art, of diversity and of the human spirit. Your current self stands in mockery of the blind man that stood in your past. Your current self is standing bathed in a halo of light, and your past self cowered in the dark by comparison.

The thought makes you shake.

* * *

 

**[Track 4]**

Wurlitzer Stereophonic, the jukebox reads; and tired eyes scan dozens of song titles. The ghostly notes of a song, remembered, fade in and out of your memory. And you don’t recall pressing the button, setting the song to play, but you hear it all the same when its first notes play through your ears, no longer ghosts but living things, made of something more real than flesh and bone.

Feet take to a pattern of forward and back, left and right, turn, back, turn, forward. And hands lift into the air and clasp around imaginary palms. You gaze into an imaginary face. And memories (both wanted and unwanted) ransack your mind. And you wander the space, feet lightly treading upon carpet, never getting too close to the walls laced in contraband. And maybe your eyes close and maybe they don’t. Maybe, when they open, they are grounded more in fantasy than in reality.

Maybe you feel more at home than you ever have, standing alone in this cool, dark space, the empty air filled up with song. Reedy voice tickling your ears.

_“Evey, please. There is a face beneath this mask, but it’s not me. I’m no more this face than the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath them.”_

And plastic is not alive, plastic cannot feel, plastic cannot bleed, but you’re certain that in that moment, you had felt her fingers alight upon your mask.

_“I understand.”_

These notes, these words, are beyond any scholar in you.

_“Thank you.”_

And if November the 5th wasn’t your final day, then what will it be? What is your new endgame? Surely you must have one. Everything else in your life has been replaced with something new. The echo of the past.  
  
What will you look forward to now? Now that Guy Fawkes’ destiny has been achieved, and your reason for living fulfilled.  
  
You need a reason to live.

And somehow, it’s her face that you keep seeing, no matter how hard you shut your eyes. The mask, after all, doesn’t have eyelids. Its eyes never close.

There are a lot of ways you might have imagined seeing her again. A chance encounter on the street, or as part of your debut performance as the new and improved V. The not-dead V. There are a lot of ways you would have wanted to reintroduce yourself to her. A whispered entreaty from behind, or a hand reached out from amongst the shadows, or in the form of a warm blanket spread over all the cold in the world.

You didn’t have the chance to imagine much, drenched in the notes of your last song. But if you had had the chance to imagine anything, you would not have imagined the chilling scream that was torn from the air at your back.

Spinning around and casting eyes on the awestruck face, you have no time for fantasy.

The Wurlitzer clicks and goes silent.

“Evey.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Disclaimer: This fanwork may or may not contain spoilers and is subject to editing and improvement. Friendly feedback is appreciated.]


End file.
